Am I SAD, or is this SWD?

It's about that point in the hitch where I'm just feeling down. Tired, a little beat-up, disconnected from the family back home. And we're not yet halfway through. Which kind of sucks.

Of course, it could be the weather.

No easy slide into the season on the Third Coast; down here, it's binary: summer/winter. Very often within the same week. Sometimes in the same day.

Winter comes in spurts down here, sweeping down from the Midwest in a bluster or the Arctic in a gale that has us cussing and complaining for a couple of days, followed by high pressure, which we like.

Rinse and repeat through mid-March, at least.

At home, my wife notices cold fronts because they bring a little rain or the temperatures drop. Out here we notice the wind and the building seas.

"While you're feeling chilly," I tell her, "I'm getting bounced around like a ping-pong ball that escaped the table."

Sixty miles of fetch and a steep slope to the sea floor make for some nasty waves out where we work. It sucks.

On the days it's not howling or we aren't sitting under a ridge of high pressure, we often have low, thick fog caused by warm air wafting across the cooler water of the Mississippi River and the nearshore continental shelf. 

I'm reasonably adept at operating the radars, and endorsed to do so, but I do not like running in fog. I do not like it one bit. It sucks.

I'm working dark 'til dark, 1800-0600, which because of the season means I can go most of a week without seeing natural light. That pretty much sucks, too.

As the days become shorter and the weather keeps folks bundled-up and indoors, people everywhere begin to suffer from something called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or so I read.

I think I may be suffering a touch of that now, or it may just be the South Louisiana strain of Shitty Weather Disorder.